Researching Art in the Middle Ages (HC)

Gertsman examines the visual, textual, aural, pastoral, and performative discourses that informed the creation and reception of the Dance of Death, and proposes different modes of viewing for several paintings, each of which invited the beholder to participate in an active, kinesthetic experience.

Sets out beliefs surrounding death and explores how they shaped attitudes to the visual arts. It reveals how people of every background commissioned devotional works and wore protective jewellery, built tombs and went on pilgrmages - all to improve their soul's chances after death.

Explores the differences between the religious life of men and women. Gender in medieval monasticism influenced landscape contexts and strategies of economic management, the form and development of buildings and their symbolic and iconographic content.

Depicting the lives of the saints in an array of factual and fictional stories, The Golden Legend was perhaps the most widely read book, after the Bible, during the late Middle Ages. It was compiled around 1260 by Jacobus de Voragine, a scholarly friar and later archbishop of Genoa, whose purpose was to captivate, encourage, and edify the faithful. See Tripod for print copies.

From Agatha to Zeno, Francis of Assisi to Mary Magdalene, Saints in Arti presents the characteristic features of more than one hundred saints often encountered in sacred Western art. Illustrated with many works of art and published by the Getty Museum.

An international group of scholars explores how medieval artists used earthly materials to construct the heavenly power of sacred relics of the saints and sheds fascinating new light on some 140 extraordinary and rare reliquaries. See some of the reliquaries in this online exhibit.